Hot shower and home cooked breakfast from our awesome hosts and we were out of Winnipeg and back on the trans canada. The morning drive was pretty uneventful as we flew into Ontario.

Right before the border is a small Welcome to Ontario sign with almost no shoulder on the highway. It was so small, that we actually over shot it had to pull a quick u-turn. After the tourist pics, another quick u-turn happened to get back going the right direction. Luckily it was just a double yellow.

The first, less impressive Ontario sign

Of course right after this, we came upon the actual welcome sign, which had a proper rest stop and turn off from the highway. Oh well.

The interesting (read: annoying) part about Ontario is the very strict driving laws. Also, the speed limit is only 90 km/h and is heavily enforced. This contrasts sharply with the prairies with a speed limit of 110 km/h and everyone drives at least 130 km/h. Ontario is going to be a slow trek.

Once we crossed the border, there was about 15 warning signs about various driving laws. Some of the notable (and possibly redundant) ones were:

“Yield to opposing traffic when passing” (ie don’t play chicken with oncoming traffic)

“Large vehicles need more room”

“Can’t see don’t pass”

“Watch for vehicles”

Our first stop of the day was at Kenora just inside Ontario. It was supposed to be a quick gas-up and supply run at Canadian Tire. However, we ended driving around the town going to a few stores and then a few liquor stores. First, we tried to fill our growlers at a local craft brewery but their growler filler was broken. Yes. The brewery did not know how to pour beer. Finally, we just went to the “Beer Store”. There was a wall with one empty of every beer they sold. After you found the one you wanted, you asked the teller, who would then get it from the back. It seemed extremely inefficient.

While barreling down into Ontario we shot a couple emails off to Lakehead Engineering Student Society in Thunder Bay. After a bit of confusion, we met up with our new friends for a couple drinks. Then called it a night and crashed on the floor of their house.

“Home is where the van is”

-Doug

PS. We knew that our website was down. UVic had a scheduled server outage and our server had not rebooted. If you are reading this, then awesome! That means our site is back online.